Nature’s Second Inheritance System

Dr Erica van de Waal delivered a talk titled: Field experiments reveal the scope of social learning in vervet monkeys

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Behavioural tradition has been an active topic in animal behaviour since the renowned Japanese macaque studies of half a century ago, yet controlled field experiments to clearly identify social learning in the wild began only recently. This talk describes a series of social learning experiments with our population of vervet monkeys in South Africa, which have now been studied for seven years. We follow over a hundred monkeys in several neighbouring groups.